YPF gast station in Argentina. Photo: marcosHB. Used under Creative Commons license.

YPF, the Argentinian state-owned oil company, has signed an agreement with Chevron in the U.S. to extract shale gas and oil using fracking technology in the southern Andes mountains. Local environmental and indigenous activists are gearing up for a fight to stop the controversial technology.

Greenpeace, explains the impact of this extraction: “The fracturing of a single well requires a huge volume of water: around 9,000 - 29,000 cubic meters (9 -29 million litres). Chemicals make up about 2 percent of the fracturing liquid, i.e. about 180,000 – 580,000 litres. Only 15 – 80 percent of the injected fluid is recovered, meaning that the rest remains underground, where it is a source of contamination to water aquifers.”

“It’s not just the land they are taking,” Lautaro Nahuel, of the Mapuche indigenous community in Neuquén, told the Earth Island Journal. “All the natural life in this region is interconnected. Here, they’ll affect the Neuquén River, which is the river we drink out of.”

Contamination from fracking has shown up in unusual places. For example communities in the U.S. have seen tap water catch on fire in fracking areas. (Watch this YouTube video and this one from Time magazine)

The Mapuche plan to join this growing international movement. “We’re ready to defend the river, the earth, and the plants so that we can continue to live and develop ourselves as a people,” says Nahuel.

Meanwhile Chevron is at the forefront of exporting fracking technology globally. The Financial Times reports that the company has been aggressively attempting to get concessions in Eastern Europe. “For years, it has been snapping up exploration acreage along a geological faultline that stretches from the Baltic to the Black Sea,” writes Guy Chazan. “A crucial piece of its jigsaw fell into place in May when it won the right to negotiate a big shale gas contract in Ukraine. That left it with an almost continuous arc of concessions stretching from Bulgaria in the south-east to Poland in the north. The blocks in Romania alone cover 2,700sq km.”